It is almost axiomatic to say that historians may lie but history cannot. Our guests' Nick Bryant, formidable and meticulously researched expose about the most shocking crime of the last century will disturb and challenge the skeptical, thrill true believers, and astound and anger everyone in-between. On this broadcast and within the pages of his book, the Franklin Scandal, official lies will be witheringly demolished and the stark truth, however unseemly, will begin to take shape. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is a conspiracy. And most explosively, the highest levels of the government are involved and shown to be in league with the worst culprits in the White House, DoJ, FBI, CIA and the Secret Service.

The FRANKLIN SCANDAL is the explosive story of a nationwide pedophile ring that pandered children to a cabal of the rich and powerful. Bryant spent seven years and traveled 40,000 miles excavating the story. In this extensively researched book, Bryant implicates politicians, major media corporations, the CIA. And more.

The ring’s pimps were a pair of Republican powerbrokers who used Boys Town as a pedophiliac reservoir, had access to the highest levels of our government, and connections to the CIA. Lawrence E. King, director of the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union and a rising black star in the GOP, was in business in the 80s with Craig Spence, the "pimp" of the operation. Spence and his boy-toys took midnight tours of the White House, thanks to military, intelligence, and Bush White House ties. Spence died a mysterious death in a hotel room just 10 weeks after the first story broke in front page headlines. Soon, a number of mysterious (and convenient) deaths along with an immediate cover-up by highly placed government officials followed an attempt to expose the ring in the 1990s.

Bryant squirreled out reams of sealed documentation of one of the grand juries that covered up the "Franklin" child-trafficking network. The documents included nearly two hundred flight logs, with the majority of the flights destined for Washington, DC. There, Craig Spence's house was wired for audio-visual blackmail. Top politicians would be compromised, and then controlled. Nick describes Craig Spence as a "self-confessed CIA asset" and has other sources to back up Spence's claims. "The Justice Department, FBI, and Secret Service went into a full court press to vaporize this scandal, so the American people wouldn't get wind that such malevolent corruption existed in their government," says Bryant.

The names of the compromised politicians had to be protected at all costs or else the American public would have been outraged by the taint and corruption in their political system. State and federal grand juries in Nebraska and a grand jury in Washington, DC played an integral role in the cover-up. Moreover, Bryant shows that officers of the court who participated in the cover-up later climbed the ladder of success in both the state and federal judiciaries.

Like so much flotsam and jetsam, victims were used, abused, and discarded, and they knew what would happen to them if they ever came clean. Carefully crafted campaigns of calumny were created to demonize the victims. Six victims summoned the courage to come forward, but FBI agents, who were protecting the identities of the compromised politicians, subjected them to torrents of threats, and most collapsed like a house of cards.

In one case, a delicately beautiful young girl named Alisha Owen, whose only crime was being born poor, was seduced at the age of 13 into the pedophilic network. At the age of 21, she refused to recant her abuse to the FBI, and she was publicly crucified by crooked state and federal grand juries that disavowed the pedophile network, and both indicted her on perjury.

The state of Nebraska pulled out all stops, spared no expense, and deployed dirty tricks to rig Alisha’s perjury trial, because her trial represented much more than a simple case of perjury—her jurors would also be deliberating the findings of the grand juries, which disavowed the pedophile network. In essence, Alisha’s guilt would protect the rich and powerful men who had been provided with children. As a kangaroo court found Alisha guilty of perjury, she had to endure the mysterious deaths of her 17-year-old brother and others affiliated with the investigation. Undaunted, she refused to recant her abuse, and a kangaroo court sentenced her to prison for 9-15 years on trumped up perjury charges. She spent nearly two of those years in solitary confinement.

Since her release from prison in 2001, Alisha has since become a model citizen: she’s now happily married and gainfully employed as a travel agent, and currently lives in Omaha. She has never recanted her abuse.

Very few cinematic profiles of courage come close to Alisha’s—Erin Brockovich’s story in comparison is like a walk in the park on a sunny, spring day.

Yet, conversely, one of the ring’s pedophilic pimps currently lives in the DC area, and has since enmeshed himself with a new supply of lower socioeconomic children to prey upon.

Nick Bryant has drawn open the curtain on so much government perfidy, and what is revealed is pedophilia, cosmetic piety, and a cesspool of profits.

After listinging to our broadcast and reading our guest's book, no one can fail to ponder this terrible unprosecuted crime.

Tune in and hear the truth!

About our guest: Nick Bryant’s writing on the plight of disadvantaged children in the United States has been featured in numerous national journals, including the Journal of Professional Ethics, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, and Journal of School Health. He has also published a book, America’s Children: Triumph of Tragedy, addressing the medical and developmental problems of lower socioeconomic children in America. His mainstream and investigative journalism has appeared in The Reader, Salon.com, Gear, and Playboy.